It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men. There were houses built of stolen corrugated iron--that cursed, hot, hideous stuff that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of wood--of stone--of mud--of mats--of skins--even of tent-cloth. Most of them were filthy. A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule. Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's fighting men all possess towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like wasp nests on a wall. These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose women, the mere penniless and the more or less useful men--not Khinjan's inner guard by any means. There were Hindus--sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts). In proof of Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were women of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice. And there were little children--little naked brats with round drum tummies, who squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; some of them were pretending to be bandits on their own account already, and one flung a stone that missed King by an inch. The stone fell in the gutter on the far side and, started a fight among the mangy street curs, which proved a diversion and probably saved King's party from more accurate attentions. Perhaps a thousand souls came out to watch, all told. Not an eye of them all missed the government marks on King's trappings, or the government brand on the mules, and after a minute or two, when the procession was half-way down the street, a man reproved the child who had thrown a stone, and he was backed up by the others. They classified King correctly, exactly as he meant they should. As a hakim--a man of medicine--he could fill a long-felt want; but by the brand on his accouterments he walked an openly avowed robber, and that made him a brother in crime. Somebody cuffed the next child who picked up a stone. He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen times since he had seen it. It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it, just as on his previous visit, there stood a stone mosque, whose roof leaned back at a steep angle against the mountain-side. The fact that it was a mosque, and that it was the only building used as such in Khinjan, had saved it from being leveled to the ground by the last British expedition.